This group was originally formed to make its way through the book "Seven Languages in Seven Weeks: A Pragmatic Guide to Learning Programming Languages," by Bruce Tate. The book is a quick deep-dive into seven very different languages: Ruby, Io, Prolog, Scala, Erlang, Clojure and Haskell.

We found we enjoyed hearing about a new language every month, so much that we decided to continue the group after the end of the book. It seemed that there was a place for a group that gives programmer-level (but not too scary!) introductions to languages that members have always heard about but haven't ever delved into. Some languages are too obscure to have their own Meetup groups, but even for the ones that aren't, sometimes you want an overview of the key features of a language and what makes it special, which you might not always get at a Meetup devoted to that language, among people who are already familiar with it.

As of this writing, we've had talks on (in addition to the languages listed above) Python, OCaml, Go, JavaScript, Smalltalk, J, and Perl. If you've got a language you'd like to hear on intro on, join the group and make a suggestion!